A follow-up to my prior post.

[Steve Ashton]

After I posted this morning about the members list and the spammers on the site, and because I have mentioned the term 'bandwidth' in a few previous posts, my email and PM boxes have been filled with requests for more information.

X Marks is a huge site. If you are in the internet forum business you gauge the size of a forum by the amount of traffic and by its bandwidth or how much traffic a site receives. We all have our sites hosted by some company that has large computers called servers. This is where the actual site is located and where the data is stored. Then as members log on and create posts or upload pictures or embed links the amount of traffic increases. Basically the server computer must work harder to handle this traffic.

A simple google search on the term 'bandwidth' comes up with this;

In website hosting, the term "bandwidth" is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in Gigabyte per month. The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer.
Consider this analogy:

• Rented Water Tank = web-server that hosts your website,
• Water company = hosting company where your web-server resides,
• Water = files, data, images, etc. that comprise your website,
• Pipe = the internet,
• Quantity of water delivered = bandwidth consumption,
• You = patron / visitor of your website which is hosted on aforementioned web-server.

There's a pipe that delivers water from your rented water tank to your home. As you request water, the water company delivers it to you. All the while, they are keeping track of how much water was delivered to you, during a billing cycle. You have a contract with the water company in which they agree to charge you a fixed dollar amount per billing cycle, provided you do not request more water than the allowable quantity, as defined in your contract. If you do request more water, they will not deny you ... but you will incur additional charges for the extra water requested / delivered.
With that example in mind, web-pages typically equate to a small quantity of water ... while images, videos, PDFs and other similar media can potentially equate to large quantities of water being delivered by your water company. The accumulated total can grow rather quickly, especially when your website is popular / visited by many people.

There are thousands of forums out there. The largest are forums about computers, gaming, and automobiles. If you discount those types of forums X Marks ranks right up there with the largest forums in the world. In fact I was told by our hosting company that we may be the largest forum in the world about a single, non computer, game or car related topic.

This thing is huge.


Now let's talk about Spam.

Spam is defined as;

The abuse of electronic message systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.
People who create electronic spam are called spammers.

Spamming is rampant on the web because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. It is also difficult to trace the spanners and hold them accountable for their actions. Spam operations can be single computer users or large 'call center' type operations in areas with little control over internet usage or little legislation regulating it.
Spamming is universally reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many places. It is also very wide spread with hundreds of thousands of spammers operating daily.

This forum attracts spammers in such numbers for a couple of reasons. One because we are so large. Big forums have a larger presence on the web and are therefor easier to find.
The other reason is because in the past we had an absentee owner many spammers just logged on, placed their spam in the user profile and waited. Each of these hidden spammers attracts more spammers.

We currently average between 3 and 20 new registrations each day. Of those two or three are legitimate members who want to join our discussions.
The rest are spammers who only want to put up a link to their porn site or their Viagra selling site and wait for our members to find them and visit.
Some however are active spammers. They actually come onto the forum and insert their stuff into existing threads such as the recent one about 'what's your favorite drink?'.

Our Forum Moderators are always on the lookout for these active spammers. It is one of their responsibilities to find them, and get them off our forum before the general membership even knows that they are there.

We have the forum software set up that each new member should go into a moderation queue to be reviewed by the Moderators before being allowed to post on the open forum. However, spammers are cunning. They find ways past these safeguards and get in despite our best efforts.

If you would like to keep abreast of the new registrations....Every time you log, in look in the right side panel of the portal page of the forum. You will see the newest member. If the Moderators haven't gotten to it yet you may catch a spammer.

[Jordan]

It really is amazing the amount of work that you and the mods put into keeping this site up and running. I commend you for your hard work I dont know if I would be able to do it day after day.

[ThistleDown]

Thank you for the up-date and almost more information than we can take in, Steve. We will need it, however, when our numbers suddenly reduce hugely. In just common-man speak, how will this reduction affect our standing? I realise that the traffic count will not alter, but we will surely drop back from somewhere near 10,000 members to not much more than half that.

[Steve Ashton]

It is common wisdom among forums that banned members are still members. Our total membership should not drop at all.
Only if we delete a member will the numbers drop and we don't do that because a deleted spammer can just join again. And the problem starts all over.

What we do is ban the spammer. We also ban his IP address and his email address if possible. This keeps them off the forum, and provides a record of those who are spammers and why.

That is the record I was mentioning earlier. If you look at the profile of a banned spammer you will see the reason they were banned. We can use that record in the future if necessary.

This record is also very important in the case of someone who has had their membership revoked. We would never revoke the membership of someone without a very good reason. The reason is usually because they have repeatedly violated our rules. This record of violations not only helps our staff in decision making but provides proof to our other members that the membership was not revoked on a whim.

So don't worry, our membership numbers should not change. They haven't so far, and we have been banning spammers for seven years now.

[ThistleDown]

Thanks, Steve.

[Steve Ashton]

Your welcome Rex.
The whole idea here is to fulfill one of the promises I made when I took over the forum.

I said that I would do all I can to make the operation of this forum as open, honest and transparent as possible.

This is the reason I am attempting to explain some things about how the forum operates.

I will be following up this over the next few days. I have a new version of the forum being coded and hope to announce its release very soon. I hope that this new version of the forum will upgrade the 'look' of the forum without causing us all having to re-learn how to use it.

This new version will, I hope, accomplish a few other things as well.

The first is to clear out some deadwood in the code. Over the years quite a few modifications have been made to the forum software. Some were an attempt to make the forum easier and more important to search engines like google. We think that with so many add-ons they are causing conflicts and may be behind the current problem of members being logged out so often.

The next modification will be to our Rules and Policies. The current set of Rules were never well thought out. They are a jumble of thoughts that were added and modified as problems arose with members. Sort of along the lines of stomping out fires instead of preventing them in the first place. We hope to have a simple set of basic rules backed up with a set of policies that should take no more than 3 minutes to read and understand.

The next goal is to bring on a new philosophy of how this forum is run. We hope to institute a "Report Based Moderation" style. This means that we will treat our members as adults. Adults have learned a sense of right and wrong. They don't need to be forced to follow rules, they follow them because it is right. We also believe that the best way to police this forum is for our members to police themselves. If you see a post or thread that you find objectionable, or which you think is a violation of our rules, you can, and should, report it to the Forum Moderators for review.

And the last thing I would like to talk about right now is our Advertising Plan. I have been trying to find a way to allow all types of companies that supply Kilts and Kilt related products a way to join this forum as advertisers.

I will talk about each of these things in depth and one at a time in further follow-up posts.

[Inchessi]

Your welcome Rex.


And the last thing I would like to talk about right now is our Advertising Plan. I have been trying to find a way to allow all types of companies that supply Kilts and Kilt related products a way to join this forum as advertisers.

Great! Like I need more temptation. Isn't it enough that I hit the links about twice a week to see if their is anything else I needed and didn't know about?

[vmac3205]

You're doing a great job, Steve and crew. I'm proud of all of you.
We'll be on Van Isle for the RSCDS ball on March 27th. Keep the coffee pot on.

[cessna152towser]

Thanks for all the explanation Steve, all the hard work you and the mods put in for the site is very much appreciated.

look in the right side panel of the portal page of the forum. You will see the newest member. If the Moderators haven't gotten to it yet you may catch a spammer.

That explains why when I logged in a few days ago I was seeing a welcome to our newest member, whose user name was not family friendly. I contacted a Mod immediately and then the offending usename quickly disappeared off the portal page.